Judge Napolitano on FBI: ‘If they can do this to David Petraeus, they can do this to anybody’

The FBI agent Kelley contacted with her initial complaint apparently became personally invested in the investigation, and sent shirtless photographs of himself to Kelley, according to numerous reports. A lawyer for the agent, who has been identified as FBI veteran Frederick Humphries, admitted this week that the pictures were sent “years ago” as part of a “larger context of what I would call social relations in which the families would exchange numerous photos of each other.”

Somehow, the FBI obtained personal emails between the different parties involved, including Kelley, Broadwell, Petraeus and others. Unless those individuals voluntarily surrendered their emails — a possibility that, while it appears unlikely, has not been ruled out — Napolitano said there are only a few equally troubling ways by which the FBI could have obtained the emails.

“In order for the FBI to read your emails, my emails, Tucker Carlson’s emails – they need a search warrant,” Napolitano told TheDC. “They can only get a search warrant in one of two ways under the current law: They could go to a federal judge and demonstrate probable cause of crime – meaning that [they have evidence] Petraeus probably committed a crime, or in my hypothetical [they have evidence] Tucker Carlson, you or me [committed a crime]. That’s hardly the case here. Or, under the [USA] Patriot Act, they could write their own search warrant if they satisfy themselves – a dubious and unconstitutional standard, but that’s the law no less: if they satisfy themselves that terrorist activity was afoot, [which is] also an irrelevant and absurd consideration here. So that means I don’t how they could have gotten a search warrant.”

“The third way they could have gotten his emails is without a search warrant by hacking into the CIA’s computers, in which case they [would have] violated criminal law themselves,” Napolitano added. “They’ve done it before – they’re probably doing it as we speak – but this would be a public violation of criminal law by the agents that did [if that’s the case].”

“Either it was an ‘innocent flash mob,’ as he told the Senate and House intelligence committees on Sept. 14, an organized terrorist attack, as most of us believe, or something far more sinister, like that it was a CIA detention center, and people were being tortured there – that would violate federal law, it would violate the president’s public statements and would violate the president’s executive order prohibiting such activity,” Napolitano said.